New Cold War with Russia Over Oil and Gas

Western analysts have accused Moscow of conspiring to turn the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — an intergovernmental body composed of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, with India, Pakistan and Iran as invited observers, meant to foster good neighborly relations and deal with issues of Central Asian security — into a sort of “OPEC with nuclear weapons,” as described by Simon Sweeney, director of the International Studies Programme of York St. John University College in the United Kingdom.

Not all analysts, however, are convinced that Russia wants to wage a New Cold War with the West and in particular with the United States.
“Someone is still fighting the Cold War, but it isn’t Russia,” Mark Almond, a professor of modern history at Oriel College, Oxford, wrote in The Guardian. “The chill is still coming from the West.”

Thomas Friedman, a devout pro-West observer, agrees. Should Moscow, he writes, really decide to leverage its energy resources to subjugate the international community, it would have other, sharper arrows in its quiver.

Russia could, as many of its hardliners have suggested, ban products from Moldova and Georgia or block the transit of their unemployed jobseekers to Russia, thus causing these countries’ economic collapse. Moscow could also destabilize Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova and Kazakhstan and then agree to annex — as these populations have requested — their pro-Russian minorities living near the borders of the old Motherland.

New America Media